Interim Assessments

Top 3 Reasons
to use the Interim Assessments

Smarter Balanced is a complete assessment system that provides teachers, families and students accurate and timely information on how students are doing, which is key to preparing students for a successful, productive future after high school.

Check

Interim assessments support teachers by helping them check where students are in their learning and determine where they need additional instruction or if they can move onto more challenging work.

Reflect

Teachers can use the results from interim assessments to help them learn and reflect on what’s working and what needs improving in their classroom.

Connect

Educators can connect with their colleagues to discuss and plan next steps for instruction and find resources in the teacher-created and approved Digital Library to enhance their professional learning and improve student performance.

More about Interim Assessments

Optional interim assessments allow teachers to check student progress throughout the year, giving them information they can use to improve their instruction and help students meet the challenge of college- and career-ready standards. These tools are used at the discretion of schools and districts, and teachers can use them to check students’ progress at mastering specific concepts at strategic points during the school year. Interim assessments consist of the following features:

Interim Comprehensive Assessments (ICAs) that test the same content and report scores on the same scale as the summative assessments.

Interim Assessment Blocks (IABs) that focus on smaller sets of related concepts and provide more detailed information for instructional purposes.

High-quality test items that are developed in the same way as those used for the summative assessments.

Questions that can be machine scored by the Smarter Balanced Test Delivery Engine (some questions such as constructed-response items and performance tasks need to be scored by teachers locally).

For Educators

Use the following documents to learn more about how Interim Assessments are built: